Welcome to Bottles of Djinn, the Web’s #1 source for entertaining, inspirational, and generally useful information, all specifically designed to support the supernatural world’s endless war against mundane reality. Like it or not, the Djinn, former undisputed masters of this world, are reawakening all across the globe. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the world as you know it…

Days go by; I wake, I mull about doing this or that, but eventually, I must always return to sleep, and so it all starts over. Money, sex, approval; the pursuit of such things seems to occupy all of my time, although I gain little by way of these things, even on the days when they come. Even though I often abandon, or temporarily neglect, my pursuit of these all too common distractions, turning instead towards a vain search for some sort of “higher purpose” for my life, it would seem that I am trapped in a world that is largely devoid of such purpose. Is the trap only inside my mind, or is it in all of the minds around me?

Because what’s even worse is that I seem unable to find anyone else who also feels themselves to be even the least bit trapped by any of this, or is aware, on any level, that they too may be merely distracting themselves until it’s time to submit to sleep once again. It’s as if they accept a life of small and petty victories, where we fight over various trophies of the flesh. It’s a life lived on behalf of our bellies, or, when we’re lucky, our reproductive organs. A life where the mind itself is simply to be dulled with whatever means must be applied to keep its natural dissatisfaction from interfering with its ubiquitous slavery to such carnal demands. Is such a life not a trap that you would wish to escape?

I am an ineffectual reaction to an almost invisible theft that no one wants to face anyway. I live, like so many others, as the captive of an endless hunger and an ever looming pain, not just because I must serve them endlessly, but because, like those around me, I often seem to serve them mindlessly. Though my spirit may forget its struggles, the dull awareness of the flesh endures like the living dead creature it is, and it seems to always draw me right back to its needs, again and again and again. With no companions who wish to be conscious of an abstract and intangible struggle such as this, a gnostic sedition that most would just as soon not be engaged in, I am left with just this momentary awareness stated here for perhaps nothing more than my own benefit, this short testimony I leave as day breaks once again, where I will restate my belief that all of us are being corrupted and co-opted by the incessant weight of meaningless and petty concerns. I believe we could all be so much more, if we just wanted it, or maybe if we could just believe that we’d actually have anyone else to share our new lives with once we got them.

With only a few moments before I must again return to sleep, I must admit that I pretty much lost the struggle again today, and I leave this sad confession to bear witness to a lonely moment in which I am filled with a simple conviction that there is something far more to life than the peaceful and monotonous continuity of this shallow struggle for praise and paper. Perhaps I will be better able to figure out exactly what that is tomorrow. Perhaps I will again create something new to pull me, and you, if you exist, out of this place, if only for just a moment. Namaste.

Simon Zealot is a recovering super villain now trying to help all of those insignificant common people he once sought to enslave and/or annihilate. He's the author of three books, The Shadow Society Guidebook, The Malakimae Manual and The Hermetic Grimoire of the Neo-Templar Order. He is also a special investigator, a martial arts instructor, an astrologer, a hypnotist, a fire performer, an escape artist, a world class mentalist, and, of course, one of the once conquered, but now returning, Djinn.